Real Champagne, as any Frenchman will tell you, can come only from the region in France of the same name. Its production, discovered somewhat by accident in the late 17th century by a blind Benedictine monk, Dom Pérignon, is lengthy, labor-intensive, and costly. It involves fermenting grapes into wine using conventional methods, bottling said wine, and then inducing a secondary fermentation in that same bottle. The second fermentation creates CO₂ as a by-product, which is intentionally retained in the finished wine as bubbles.   More

Real Champagne, as any Frenchman will tell you, can come only from the region in France of the same name. Its production, discovered somewhat by accident in the late 17th century by a blind Benedictine monk, Dom Pérignon, is lengthy, labor-intensive, and costly. It involves fermenting grapes into wine using conventional methods, bottling said wine, and then inducing a secondary fermentation in that same bottle. The second fermentation creates CO₂ as a by-product, which is intentionally retained in the finished wine as bubbles.

The Champagne zone is only an hour and 15 minutes or so east of Paris. The most important aspects of the terroir are 1)the cool climate (the region lies pretty much at the northern limit of viability for grapegrowing), and 2)the extremely chalky soil, which paradoxically affords both good drainage in wet years and the capacity for water retention in warm ones. Only three grape varieties can legally be used in Champagne production: Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier, and Chardonnay. When made from only one or both of the first two of these, the wine is considered a Blanc de Noirs; when made entirely from the white Chardonnay grape, it is a Blanc de Blancs. When made from both black and white grapes, there is no particular moniker attesting to that.

A high-quality Champagne will exhibit a fine "bead," i.e., persistent strings of very tiny bubbles. It will also show a certain dynamic tension between the toasty, biscuity richness imparted by its time in the bottle spent aging on its lees and the elegant austerity imposed by a firm spine of natural acidity.   Less